This got me quite excited, because half way in I realized (my understanding
of) this ties in very closely to an aha experience I had using TiddlyWiki's
TagglyTagging - I'll try not to dwell on specific implementation details,
just wanted to set a context on which to hang these somewhat abstract
ideas, in case others (beside PMario) are TW-literate.
For those without too much time on their hand, skip to the bottom line,
just scan quickly if it seems at all of interest, or ignore completely.
Let's say I've got the complete works of Carl Jung in plain text format,
and I want to create a self-contained hypertext "study guide" with several
"axes of access" for organizing in-depth textual analysis:
- the full text of the original works themselves
- broken down into chunks
- hypertext links for footnotes, the original front-matter ToC and
end-matter indices
- so far nothing new, just as a well-curated ebook would present itself
- expanded indices, cross-referencing the various works originally
published separately
- more modern/relevant terminology
- separate topic-domain-specific terminology indexing and
cross-referencing "axes", e.g.
- clinical psychology and psychoanalysis (his "home domain" in
traditional academia)
- social sciences
- transpersonal psychology, dreams and the collective unconscious
- humanities, literature and the arts
- traditional myth, religion and spirituality, including 12-Step
recovery, Zen, the I Ching et al
- the "supernatural" - mysticism, alchemy, parapsychology, UFOs, the
occult etc
Then, starting to depart from the "pure/original" full text, adding content
from third parties:
- summary texts with brief/superficial commentary tied in to the
full-text and the above indices
- in-depth "textbooks" and "study guides" which combine quotes
from/pointers to the original fulltext
- selecting, re-ordering and combining from the various works freely as
the third-party author sees fit
- with extensive third-party analysis, clearly distinguished from the
text written by Jung himself
- also for these works, summary texts with brief/superficial commentary
- and of course all cross-referenced by the above indices
Think of what Leo now offers in the navigation outline as **the**
"canonical" ToC outline for the original work. Forgetting clones for now, a
single dimensioned hierarchy, ordered from top to bottom, click on "The
Practice of Psychotherapy", "Chapter 1" etc. and you follow the original
sequence, with the text "chunked" into nodes granular enough to be
meaningfully "tagged" by indexing topic terms.
Now make that say the first "Tab" called "Fulltext ToC". Have a second tab
titled "Summary ToC" - in this case it will look identical, but traverse
the summary texts rather than the fulltext (with internal cross-references
inline with the content as well). Then a Tab for each work about or
commenting on Jung's work, starting with say "Jennings' *Passages Beyond
the Gate"*, or the 2007 course syllabus for Harvard Prof John Mack's course
on UFO abduction.
UI issues aside, my point is that each of these "alternative tables of
contents" can each stand on their own and present their own subset of the
content, re-sequenced and interleaved between different works from
different authors.
In my implementation of such hypertext "undatabases" using TiddlyWiki, it's
ability to give "meta-tags" to topic tags and navigation "meta-nodes" was
critical, so that the traditional psychoanalysis domain's use of the term
"superconscious" is kept separate from Blavatsky and Gurdjieff's, and the
Summary ToC clickable for Chapter 1 is separate from the Fulltext's.
*
*I've kind of run out of steam at this point, as I'm sure has anyone wading
through all this along with me - thanks for your patience, and I hope my
Aha seems at least tangentially relevant to Ed's, although I'm sure his had
a radically different focus.
Bottom line is - empower the user to create multiple "parallel universes"
of meta-trees to navigate the same super-set of data.
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